“That is a very genteel way of putting it. A more accurate, if less charitable characterization would be that he’s building a little empire through a tangle of favor-trading, generous procurements, and, when all else fails, character assassination.”
I thought of the elder Holmes, corpulent, with deep-sunk eyes and protruding brow. He could be stern and even impatient, but— “Holmes, I can’t believe that your brother would—”
“Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, James.” He only called me by the old pet name of my departed Mary when he was really in knots. My breath quickened. “For it’s true. Ah, here we are.”
“Here” turned out to be a shuttered cabinet-maker’s workshop, its old-fashioned, hand-painted sign faded to near illegibility. Holmes produced a key from a pocket and smoothly unlocked the heavy padlock to let us both in, fingers going quickly to a new-looking alarm panel to one side of the door and tapping in a code.
“Had an estate agent show me around last week,” he said. “Snapped a quick photo of the key and made my own, and of course it was trivial to watch her fingers on the keypad. This place was in one family for over a century, but their building was sold out from under them and now they’ve gone bust. The new freeholder is waiting for planning permission to build a high-rise and only considering the shortest of leases.”
The lights came on, revealing a sad scene of an old family firm gone to ash in the property wars, work-tables and tools worn by the passing of generations of skilled hands. Holmes perched on a workbench next to a cast-iron vise with a huge steel lever. He puffed his pipe alight and bade me sit in the only chair, a broken ladderback thing with a tapestry cushion that emitted a puff of ancient dust when I settled.
“I was deep in my researches when the young man knocked. I may have been a little short with him, for he was apologetic as I led him into my study and sat him by the fire. I told him that no apologies were necessary. I have, after all, hung out my shingle—I’ve no business snapping at prospective clients who interrupt my day.”
Holmes spoke in his normal tones, the raconteur’s humblebrag, without any hint of the nervousness I’d detected in him from the moment I’d stepped through his door. We might have been in his study ourselves.
“I knew straightaway that he was a soldier, military intelligence, and recently suspended. I could see that he was a newly single man, strong-willed, and trying to give up cigarettes. I don’t get many visitors from the signals intelligence side of the world, and my heart quickened at the thought of a spot of real intrigue for a change.”
“I understand that you are a man who can keep confidences, Mr. Holmes.”
“I have held STRAP 3 clearance on nine separate occasions, though at the moment I hold no clearances whatsoever. Nevertheless, you may be assured that Her Majesty’s Government has given me its imprimatur as to my discretion.”
My visitor barked a humorless laugh then. “Here stands before you proof that HMG is no judge of character.”
“I had assumed as much. You’ve brought me a document, I expect.”
He looked abashed, then defiant. “Yes, indeed I have,” and he drew this from his pocket and thrust it upon me.
Holmes drew a neatly folded sheet of A4 from his inside pocket and passed it to me. I unfolded it and studied it.
“Apart from the UK TOP SECRET STRAP 1 COMINT markings at the top, I can make neither head nor tail,” I admitted.
“It’s rather specialized,” Holmes said. “But it might help if I told you that this document, headed ‘HIMR. Data Mining Research Problem Book,’ relates to malware implantation by GCHQ.”
“I know that malware is the latest in a series of names for computer viruses, and I suppose that ‘malware implantation’ is the practice of infecting your adversaries with malicious computer code.”
“Quite so. You may have heard, furthermore, of EDGEHILL, the TOP SECRET STRAP 1 program whose existence was revealed in one of the Snowden documents?”
“It rings a bell, but to be honest, I got a sort of fatigue from the Snowden news—it was all so technical, and so dismal.”
“Tedium and dismalness are powerful weapons—far more powerful than secrecy in many cases. Any bit of business that can be made sufficiently tedious and over-complexified naturally repels public attention and all but the most diligent of investigators. Think of the allegedly public hearings that demand their attendees sit through seven or eight hours of monotonic formalities before the main business is tabled—or of the lengthy, tedious documents our friends in Brussels and Westminster are so fond of. If you want to do something genuinely evil, it is best for you that it also be fantastically dull.”